NVMe Memory Tiering Design and Sizing on VMware Cloud Foundation 9 – Part 1: Pre-requisites and Hardware Compatibility

PART 1: Prerequisites and Hardware Compatibility Workload Assessment Software Pre-requisites NVMe Compatibility Discover more from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog Related Articles SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver Support for vSphere in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 on Intel Xeon 6 CPUs with P-core Systems Scaling VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Lab Environments using Holodeck 9.0 VMware Cloud Foundation Automation - All Apps Organization Configurations At VMware Explore 2025 in Las Vegas, a plethora of announcements were made as well as many deep dives into the new features and enhancements included in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9, including the popular NVMe Memory Tiering feature. Although this feature is available at the compute component of VCF (vSphere), we refer to it in the context of VCF given the deep integration with other components such as VCF Operations, which we will refer to in later blogs. Memory Tiering is a new feature included with VMware Cloud Foundation and was one of the main topics of conversation for most of my sessions at VMware Explore 2025. I saw a lot of interest, and a lot of great questions came from our customers on adoption, use cases, etc. This is a multi-part blog series where I intend to help answer a lot of the common questions coming from our customers, partners, and internal staff. For a high level understanding of what Memory Tiering is, please refer to this blog. Before enabling Memory Tiering, a thorough assessment of your environment is crucial. Start by evaluating workloads in your datacenter and pay special attention to memory. One of the key measures we will look at is the active memory of the workload. For workloads to be an optimal candidate for Memory Tiering, we want the total active memory to be 50% or less of the DRAM capacity. Why 50% you ask? Well, the default configuration of Memory Tiering is to provide you with 100% more memory or 2x your memory. So, after enabling Memory Tiering, half of the memory will be coming from DRAM (Tier 0) and the other half comes from NVMe (Tier 1).